[ZWeb] Zope.org and New zope.org status

[Guido van Rossum]

Lots of issues to respond to.

- Volunteers.  I regret that it appears as if offers to volunteer are
  being ignored.  That's not supposed to happen!!!  Zope.org (old or
  new) can't work without volunteers.  The volunteers need to be
  coordinated, and for the NZO transition, that's Sidnei's job.  He
  has asked for volunteers once, and one was even officially sworn in,
  but I don't know what happened after that; I haven't heard Sidnei
  reporting that any volunteers were doing anything.  Maybe Sidnei
  dropped the ball?  (He spent three weeks in the hospital, which may
  have had something to do with it.)  Several people have said they
  would volunteer; to cut things short I suggest that they write again
  directly to Sidnei (cc'ing me) offering their help.  One thing:
  before you can get access to the management side of the site, you
  need to sign a non-disclosure form, because you have access to lots
  of privacy-sensitive data.  But that shouldn't hold you up more than
  a day.

- Plone.  Whether or not it's compatible with CMF is anybody's guess,
  but it's certain that Zope Corp couldn't help Sidnei if any
  Plone-related problems were to crop up.  When we started Sidnei's
  contract, we discussed this with him and decided not to use Plone.
  I believe the reasons for that decision still stand, and in any case
  I don't want to jeopardize the alpha (planned 3 weeks from now!) by
  switching now.  Once we have the new site up, I'm all for making a
  plan to improve the look and feel if needed, but our first priority
  should be to get the new site in production.  Note that we *have* a
  winning design for a skin (designed by Nicolas from IngeniWeb by the
  way -- I forgot to mention that last time).

- Download mirroring.  The downside of using SourceForge is that it
  requires explicit synching of selected downloads.  How about setting
  up a set of community-run mirrors of the zope.org download bits?
  This could be done as follows: when downloadable contents is
  uploaded, an extra copy is made to somewhere on the filesystem.  (Or
  maybe a nightly cronjob hunts through ZODB for downloadable contents
  and copies it.)  This section of the filesystem is then made
  available to mirrors through ftp and rsync (I don't know what mirror
  sites prefer; for python.org, we support both, although rsync seems
  more modern).  The zope.org webmaster maintains a list of mirror
  sites, and when you select a file for download, you are offered a
  menu of links directly to the mirror sites, with their geographical
  locations.  There needs to be a way to collate download stats from
  the mirrors, and there needs to be a way to provide feedback on
  mirrors that are in decay, so the webmaster can remove them from his
  list.  None of this should be rocket science, and since Sidnei is
  writing a new product for downloadable content anyway (boy did the
  old one suck :-( ) it shouldn't be too hard to integrate it in
  there.

- Zope3.org.  Since the Rotterdam sprint I've been fairly active in
  Zope3 (and expect to be much more so, with others at PL, in the next
  half year), and I think a separate site for Zope 3 developement is a
  great idea.  Obviously, once Zope 3 is ready to replace Zope 2 for
  production work, zope.org should be the place to learn about Zope 3
  (and zope3.org could remain as a site for Zope 3 developers).  I'm
  doubtful whether Zope 3 is currently capable of serving such a site
  itself: too many things are in still flux or not yet working, there
  are no content-specific products, searching and indexing doesn't
  work yet (it's a shallow problem), and it's veeeeerrrry slllloooow.
  But according to the "eat your own dogfood" theory, we should
  attempt to do this ASAP -- maybe we should strive to transfer all
  Zope 3 developement knowledge to zope3.org a month from now.

- Any other questions?  Please ask here.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)